ScribeSteep: Record Both Sides of a Call, Transcribe Locally

Somebody says the thing you'll need six weeks from now, and you're the one typing it down, so you miss the next three sentences. That's the trade every note-taker makes. The usual fix is a bot that joins the meeting on your behalf, and both the sound and the words end up on a server you don't control.

ScribeSteep went live on the Pour Over shelf this week, and it removes the second half of that trade. It records your calls, both sides, and turns them into editable text on your own machine. Version 1.5.0, macOS and Windows.

Your voice and theirs, nothing else

The input is your microphone plus the audio of one app you pick: a video call, a browser tab, a webinar player. The scope stops there. A message notification that chimes mid-interview, or a song playing in another window, stays out of the file.

The flow is short. Join the call first, then open ScribeSteep, and the app you're talking in appears under "Record from". Leave the language on Auto-detect, press record, and watch the two level meters confirm that your mic and the call are both coming through. Nothing joins the meeting on your behalf. There's no bot in the participant list, and nobody on the other end gets a recording banner they didn't ask for.

When you stop, the recording lands in a library grouped by day, and the transcript follows it.

The words stay on your disk

Capture and transcription both run locally, and that matters here because a transcript of a meeting is some of the most sensitive text a person produces in a working week: figures, names, half-formed plans, other people's problems. Hand that to a cloud service and a copy exists somewhere you'll never see again. It's the same argument as Your Files Are Training Data, aimed at the one medium most people never think to question.

ScribeSteep keeps one library on your machine. On first run it walks you through the audio permissions it needs and, if your computer calls for it, a one-time download of the speech model at about 550 MB. Capturing can carry on while that finishes; those files get their text as soon as it lands. After that the app works with the network off, which is how the rest of this menu behaves too.

Reading it back

Every line carries a timestamp. Clicking one jumps playback to that moment, which is how you check a quote at the source. Correct a misspelled name or a misheard word directly in the transcript; the edit saves as you type and doesn't shift the timing underneath.

Auto-detect handles 100 languages, or you can name the language your call is in before you start. On a fast enough machine the words appear while people are still talking. On an older one they arrive shortly after you press stop.

Three export shapes: plain text for notes, Markdown for your own documents, and .srt subtitles. The subtitles are the one I'd reach for first. Export the .srt and drop it onto a timeline in MokaStudio to caption a video without typing the dialogue a second time.

The app stores recordings compactly, and the choice of what stays is yours. Delete the audio of a call from March and keep the transcript, or delete both.

Where it earns its place

Meetings and stand-ups, so the point of being there is listening. User interviews, because a timestamped quote beats a tidy summary. Lectures and webinars worth skimming a second time. Podcast guests and video calls that need subtitles without a second pass of typing.

Two limits come with it. Its capture is scoped to one app plus your mic, and live transcription leans on the processor, so a busy laptop hands you the text a minute after you stop.

On the menu

ScribeSteep sits on the Pour Over shelf at getapps.cafe/menu#pourover, alongside the rest of the precision tools. It's a membership app: one subscription covers it and the other 126 apps, on macOS and Windows, from $4.99 a month paid yearly or $9.99 monthly, with a 7-day free trial.

Calls used to be the one part of my week where the record lived on somebody else's infrastructure, or nowhere at all. Now the sound and the text sit in a folder on my own disk, and I can search a conversation from August without asking anyone's permission. Small comfort, until the day it isn't.

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